What was your favorite all-time toy you got for Christmas?

Probably the puppet theatre my sister and I got when I was 3-ish and she was 5-ish. That and the dollhouse we got a few years later sustained us throughout our childoods. Heck, I *still* mess abour in the dollhouse when I'm home.

and a subscription to a science book of the month club. This had the ironic effect of diverting my young mind from the path of belief upon which my classmates and a human doily of a sunday school teacher expected me to tread. By the next christmas I was more certain than an 11 year old has any right to be that christianity was just stories, same as greek or egyptian myths...it didn't have the right answers, it didn't even have the right questions.

Took me decades to figure out that the questions were often the right questions and more valuable than most of my answers...which I could prove to be right but whose value I had never thought about.

I remember it because [a]it was something I wanted even more than all the junk I thought I wanted [hey, TV ads, other kids at school...they work on yer mind] and [b] I felt guilty because my siblings did not get such valuable, cool, advanced things.

A lot to blame on a microscope. The books did more unintended liberating but was it the one on Pasteur, or dinosaurs or volcanos, Galileo? Maybe they did no more than add a bit of speed to developments that would have come about anyway.

The right gift, the great gift, could be anything....if it is given to you at the right moment.

Like Greensmile in many ways -- the best one turned out to be not the most obvious "thought I wanted," though I was geeky enough to have had it near the top of my list...and, like GS, one that opened up the universe for me:

Since then, I have always been interested in the ways in which dull things get shiny and fascinate, always liked hacking at the world until it breaks into more manageable pieces...and always, always, always known in my heart that the inside of everything is more beautiful, more possible, and more pointy than the outside.

Of course, that was also the year I believed I could communicate with squirrels telepathically. Seriously.

So maybe a better bet is the "I will" from Darcie. Note to others, esp. The_Lex: if you pick Xmas eve as your engagement anniversary, though you'll have to look hard hard hard for a nice place to be open, you end up with a seriously romantic yearly celebration...and, better still, every excuse that counts to sneak out of the parents' house for years and years and years while others drowse by the fire, thus rejuvenating self and soulmate for the morning afterwards.